Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Ludwig Feuerbach 7: Lectures

Thus, because religion rules over life and death,
heaven and hell, because it transforms laws into the commandments of an all-powerful
being—the essence of all human wishes and fears—religion gains control of, or
is favored by, human egoism and so exerts a terrible power over man, especially
uncivilized man, a power beside which the power of ethics, especially of
abstract, philosophical ethics, pales to nothingness, and which for this reason
seems indispensable.

But no one can fail to see that religion exerts this
power through the imagination alone, that its power resides solely in the
imagination; for if the power of religion were anything more than imaginary, if
religion were really the positive foundation and support of justice and ethics,
the promises and punishments of religion would have sufficed for the founding
and preservation of states, men would never have devised all the many
exquisitely cruel punishments they employ for the prevention of crime. Or if
you will, we acknowledge that religion is the foundation of states, but with
this limitation: only in the imagination, in belief, in opinion, for in reality
states, even Christian states, are built not on the power of religion, though
they have used it too (i. e., credulity, man’s weak point) as a means to their
ends, but on the power of bayonets and other instruments of torture. In reality
men act out of entirely different motives than their religious imagination
leads them to suppose. In his chronicle of Louis XI, the pious Philippe de
Commines writes: “All evils or transgressions come from lack of faith; if men
firmly believed what God and the Church tell
us about the eternal and terrible torments of hell, they could not do what they
do.”

But whence comes this weakness of faith? From the
fact that the power of belief is nothing other than the power of imagination,
and that reality is an infinitely greater power, directly opposed to the
imagination. Like the imagination, faith is hyperbolic; it moves only in
extremes, in exaggerations; it knows only of heaven and hell, angels and
devils; it tries to make more of man than he should be, and consequently makes
less of him than he could be; it tries to make him into an angel and
consequently, given the opportunity, makes him into a true devil. Faced with
the resistance of prosaic reality, the hyperbolic fantasies of faith shift into
their direct opposite! Human life would
be in a bad way if law and ethics had no other basis than religious faith,
which so easily turns into itsopposite,
because, as even the greatest heroes of faith have confessed, it flies in the
face of sensory evidence, natural feeling, and man’s innate tendency to
disbelief. How, indeed, can anything built on constraint, on the forcible
repression of a sound inclination, anything exposed at every moment to the mind’s
doubts and the contradictions of experience, provide a firm and secure
foundation? To believe that the state—I mean of course the state as such, not
our artificial, supranaturalistic political edifices—cannot exist without
religious faith is to believe that our natural legs are not sufficient for man
to stand or walk on, that he can only stand and walk on stilts. And these
natural legs, the support of ethics and law, are love of life, self-interest,
egoism.

Accordingly, nothing is more groundless than the fear
that the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, must vanish with
the gods. The distinction exists and will continue to exist as long as there is
a difference between me and thee, for this is the source of ethics and law. My
egoism may permit me to steal, but my fellow man’s egoism will sternly forbid
me; left to myself I may know nothing of unselfishness, but the selfishness of
others will teach me the virtue of unselfishness. My masculine egoism may be
inclined to polygamy, but feminine egoism will oppose my inclination and
champion monogamy: I may be unaware of the beam in my own eye, but the merest
mote in it will be a thorn in the critical eye of others. In short, though it may
be of no concern to me whether I am good or bad, it will always be a matter of
concern to the egoism of others.

Who has always been the ruler of states? God? Good
heavens, no! The gods rule only in the heavens of the imagination, not on the
profane ground of reality. Who then? Egoism and egoism alone, though not simple
egoism, but the dualistic egoism of those who have devised heaven for
themselves and hell for others, materialism for themselves and idealism for
others, freedom for themselves but servitude for others, enjoyment for
themselves but resignation for others—the egoism of those who as rulers punish
their subjects for the crimes they themselves have committed, who as fathers
visit their own crimes on their children, who as husbands punish their wives
for their own weaknesses, who in general forgive themselves all offenses and
assert their egos in all directions, but expect others to have no egos, to live
on air, to be as perfect and immaterial as angels. Not the limited egoism to
which the term is ordinarily confined but which is only one variety, though the
most common; but the egoism which comprises as many varieties as there are
aspects of human nature, for there is not only a singular or individual egoism,
but also a social egoism, a family egoism, a corporate egoism, a community
egoism, a patriotic egoism. True, egoism is the source of evil, but it is also
the source of good, for what else but egoism gave rise to agriculture,
commerce, the arts and the sciences? True, it is the source of all vices, but
also the source of all virtues, for what gave rise to the virtue of honesty?
Egoism, through the prohibition of theft! What molded the virtue of chastity?
The egoism of those who did not wish to share their beloved with others,
through the prohibition of adultery. What produced the virtue of truthfulness?
The egoism of those who do not wish to be deceived and cheated, through the
prohibition of lying.

Egoism was the first lawgiver and promoter of the
virtues, though only out of hostility to vice, only out of egoism, only because
what opposes my egoism strikes me as a vice—just as conversely, what to me is a
blow against my egoism is to others an affirmation of theirs, and what to me is
a virtue isto them a benefit.Moreover, vices are
just as necessary, if not more so, for the preservation of states, at least of
our despicable, unnatural and inhuman states, as are virtues. To cite an
example that is close to me because I am writing on Bavarian soil, though not
in a Bavarian spirit (or in a Prussian or Austrian spirit either, for that
matter): if Christianity in our country were anything more than a clerical
phrase, if the spirit of Christian asceticism and subjugation of the senses
should take hold of the Bavarian people, leading them to abstain from beer
drinking, or only from immoderate beer drinking, what would become of our
Bavarian state? And despite its “substantial faith,” the Russian state finds
its chief source of revenue in poison—in vodka. Without beer, then, there would
be no Bavaria, and without distilled liquor no Russia or even Bo‑Russia.*